


no lies, no apologies

by kwritten



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-28
Updated: 2015-03-28
Packaged: 2018-03-20 00:58:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3630735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>setting: an au in which Dead Things ends just slightly differently</p><p> </p><p>warning: this fic is dedicated to any and all women who have ever felt as though they had to be kind and good, but have only ever been hurt and abused in return. there are millions of us. putting others first, trying to play peace-keeper, giving a shoulder to another when we really need one in return, who have been told their softness is why they are hurt, but also told never to lash out. this story is for every woman who has ever felt worn out and tired and dragged down by the world - told to give but never getting the support she needs in return. here is your anger. it is justified. it is beautiful. and Tara should have been the voice we so deserve. this story is for you. this story is for me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no lies, no apologies

There are some things that are instinctive. 

Studying, loving, _needing_ , giving. 

She gives to the point of hurt and she holds back to the point of complete abandon. There is only black and white and everything is always grey. 

There are some things that go without saying.

And what she knows about herself without ever telling anyone is that her heart is a fire encased in ice torn through the wreckage of a world that spat her out and taught her only hate and loathing in return for her need. 

 

When she was four, her mother read her the story of _Cinderella_ for the first time and as a young, neglected girl sat beneath a willow tree and cried out for the mother that had long since gone she said in her clear, childlike knowing, _That will be us._

Except only in fairy tales do dead mothers send up golden slippers and silver dresses for their tear-stained daughters. In the real world, dead mothers are silent. 

In the real world, even living mothers cannot protect their daughters from the hurt of the world and so they deal in tricks and whispers to protect themselves. 

 

Tara watches herself in the mirror and shakes her hair forward to cover half of her face. She is good, she is kind. She is angry. She demands perfection from herself and refuses failure in others. She is not as good as she knows she should be. She does not deserve the kindness she forces herself to give others. She is broken and pieced back together. 

She is a girl who hides behind a curtain of hair and soft words because mothers have a lingering impact on their daughters. 

And she was never taught how to take things with force. 

 

When Buffy’s voice, stilted and strange in her ear, calls her back to the house that she lived and loved and hurt in, she goes.

Because she is good and she is kind and she is loving and she cares. 

So even though it hurts to stand on that porch and ring that doorbell and wait for a girl (that isn’t her girl) to come answer the door, she does.

Because she is the good one. 

 

When Buffy opens the door to find Tara on the other side, she’s almost surprised. It takes a half a beat to remember that she is the one that called her, that she is the one that needed someone and so she sought out the one person that she knows implicitly will know what to say to her. 

(Even if she wants to be told something else. Even if she wants to come out of this confessional battered and bruised.)

There’s a painful carefulness to Tara’s tread as she makes her way to the living room and sits down on the couch. Buffy should ask her how she is, should inquire into her pain, should be a good friend.

Except she is drowning in her own pain and just looking for an outlet and wants to be greedy and selfish and let go of responsibility. Just for one, precious, stolen moment. 

With the person that doesn’t belong to her. 

With the only other person whose pain is crawling out of her skin in equal measure to her own. 

 

And maybe that was the first sign.   
That she was about to get something that she had stopped daring to hope for. 

 

In the instant that Buffy’s head collapsed into her lap, Tara’s heart clenched and it wasn’t in empathy or in understanding or in friendship. 

She felt her own desperate, clawing _need_ rising up out of her like a living, breathing thing. 

In the months after learning that she was not – in fact – a demon, Tara thought that she no longer had to fight the monster crawling beneath her breast. Told herself that it was never there, that the yearning she felt was a figment of her imagination, that she was free to be good. 

Free to be kind. 

Free to be selfless. 

And the monster they told her she was could no longer hold her back from being that person she so desperately longed to be. 

The person that held a broken soul in her lap and thought only of how to give comfort and thought nothing of taking it. The person that stroked the hair of a crying girl and didn’t desperately crave to run her teeth along those shaking shoulders and lick up those falling tears. 

No. 

She was _good_.

 

 _A monster._

That’s what she whispered to herself over and over again into the soft fabric of Tara’s skirt. _Call me a monster. Tell me I’m trash._

They told her there was something of the dead in her, something that longed for the darkness, and it had felt true when she hunted them in the darkness, when she held them in her arms and let go of her last lingering grasp on humanity. 

They told her. Over and over, again and again. 

When they left, they told her. When they clung to her and cried out as her nails scratched painfully down their backs, drawing their blood as she sought her pleasure. 

They told her. 

And she believed them now, now as she imagined dragging her fingers up the hem of that skirt and pressing her lips against warm skin that did not belong to her and could not bring her darkness or solace, but only a strange inevitable conviction of her own inner demon. 

She finally believed them now, crying into the lap of a woman who belonged to another, whose pain was tangible enough to reach out and stroke with her fingers in the air between them, who wore goodness and warmth on her lips like a balm from a saint. 

 

There are monsters in the darkest and the lightest hearts. They tell us what we do not want to know about ourselves. They tug away at the things we _want_ from ourselves. 

They laugh and they train and they tease and we fight them back. 

There are monsters everywhere we look. 

But the only ones we fight to hold back are the ones in our own hearts. 

 

They made cocoa in the kitchen in silence. Tara pressed ibuprofen into Buffy’s hand without comment. Palm against palm their skin told them what neither wanted to know. 

Skin against skin that said: I know that pain, that ache in your heart that you try to release through tears that moves to your head and you feel as though you drowned in a bottle of scotch and all you were really trying to do was release yourself of the worst parts of the agony you can’t express in any other way. 

When Buffy moved to the door to let Tara escape the stifling silence of a home that was no longer her home and no longer felt real, she let her mind briefly linger on the image of her kissing the other woman on the couch, her face wet with tears and Tara so soft beneath her fingertips. 

You fight your inner demons one step at a time. They live inside your mind and threaten to take over the things in the world that are precious to you. 

Tara opened her mouth to say something at the same moment that Buffy blurted out, “Sorry for making you come over here after…”

They stared at each other for a heartbeat. 

“Wait. What did you say?”

Tara looked out the door and swallowed, as if deciding something within herself, before looking back at Buffy with her soft doe-eyes full of something that in anyone else Buffy would have described as fire, “I could stay. If you want.”

Buffy stared at her, at the open door, thought back to the couch where her tears stained the front of Tara’s skirt and soft fingers danced through her hair. 

“I-I mean. I want. I can stay. You… I don’t have to,” Tara inwardly winced at her ridiculous stutter, at the way she doubted herself, at her begging for something she wanted by asking to give. 

It took everything in her to throw it away, all her years of careful training, all her careful watchful painful years of strategic yearning through giving instead of taking. 

“I want…”

She wasn’t sure what she wanted exactly. But she didn’t want to walk through the lonely streets of Sunnydale and wrap herself up in her good intentions and selfless acts and sleep the sleep of the damned and the forgotten. 

Buffy shook her head, “You want to wait for Willow?” She thought of that bed upstairs tucked away behind a door that once housed her mother and then held young, bright, witchy lovers hanging on to her life even in death. 

She didn’t want her to wait for Willow. 

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Tara smiled and it was coy and not at all shy and a little bit wicked, “Good. Because that’s not why I want you to ask me to stay.”

Buffy shut the door with a flick of her wrist, “Stay?”

“Ask me to stay for you.” Let me drown in a good deed. Let me do as you ask. Let me feel selfless when you ask me for the thing that I want. Let me have something that isn’t good. Let me hide behind goodness for one more night.

A demon clawed at her ribs, stretching its wings within her heart. 

Let me say it was selfless in the morning.   
Let me know it was selfish today. 

“I need you,” Buffy breathed. “Please don’t go.”

Tara nodded, “I can stay for you, if you want.”

 

It was a dance of monsters playing at being girls. 

It was need. 

 

“My mother, she taught me to be selfless, to be good. Her mother told her that doing things for others kept the demon at bay. That if she was good and kind and helpful, the demon would have less power.”

“They told me that my power was to save people. That killing and hunting was protecting the innocent. They told me I was the opposite of a demon – but I think they lied.”

“Lying is easy.”

“Lying keeps us going, keeps us begging for scraps.”

“Lying keeps us from taking.”

 

Faith gave into her monster, that’s what Buffy remembers first. _Want. Take. Have._ She was a monster. She killed and she maimed and she hurt. 

“Let me hold you,” Tara whispered from where she stood at the other side of the bed, in just an old t-shirt of Buffy’s and a pair of ratty boxers. 

Buffy only nodded, curling up on the bed and letting Tara fold her limbs around her, back to chest and fingers sliding smooth down her arms. 

“I’m sorry about Willow,” she said after a few moments. 

Tara stiffened, “First rule, no apologizing. I’m sick to death of apologizing.”

Buffy chuckled and crept closer to the girl on her bed, limbs tangled in her limbs. “Second rule?”

Tara hummed, rubbing her chin on Buffy’s shoulder contemplatively, “Second rule… no lies.”

“Third rule,” Buffy yawned. “Third rule is sleep.”

 

It was the first good night’s sleep either had in months. 

 

 

“You aren’t a replacement for Spike,” she said a week later, taking out her earrings and laying them on the desk while Tara read curled up on the bed.

“Yes I am.”

Buffy stood stock-still, “Am I a replacement for Willow?”

Tara looked up from her book, “Would that bother you?”

“No lies.”

“No lies? Yes. No. Sometimes.”

“The first time?”

Tara smiled and it wasn’t the smile of a girl who was happy or a girl who was sad and pretending to be happy, lying to herself and others to keep the peace. It was the smile of memory and honesty. “No.”

 

 

They got into their first fight before they even kissed, Buffy throwing an alarm clock at Tara’s head and Tara turning it into a feather before it made it even halfway across the room. 

It was a fight about nothing. 

It wasn’t a fight at all. 

It didn’t end in bloodshed or tears or laughter or kisses. 

It rang of honesty and it hurt because they didn’t lie. 

 

They never lied. 

And that in itself was a lie. 

They didn’t know how _not_ to lie. 

Their monsters gave them no choice in the matter. 

 

 

“Want. Take. Have.”

And so she stole a kiss. And it didn’t heal her broken heart and it didn’t make the fog go away. It was just a kiss and it felt good so they did it again. 

And again. 

And tried a few other things as well. 

It was selfish and it was selfless and it was nothing they were prepared for.   
And maybe that was the best that they could do. 

 

“No lies,” she whispered, fingers curling through fingers and shoulders brushing shoulders. 

And they walked out into the light of day and left behind their hidden things. 

 

And never apologized.


End file.
